Journal Article

sc2MeNetDrug: A computational tool to uncover inter-cell signaling targets and identify relevant drugs based on single cell RNA-seq data

Goedegebuure, S. Peter, Wang, Ting, Hawkins, William, Fields, Ryan C., Zeng, Amanda, Payne, Philip, DeNardo, David, Li, Fuhai, Bi, Ye, Feng, Jiarui, Ding, Li

2024

Overview

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is a powerful technology to investigate the transcriptional programs in stromal, immune, and disease cells, like tumor cells or neurons within the Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) brain or tumor microenvironment (ME) or niche. Cell-cell communications within ME play important roles in disease progression and immunotherapy response and are novel and critical therapeutic targets. Though many tools of scRNA-seq analysis have been developed to investigate the heterogeneity and sub-populations of cells, few were designed for uncovering cell-cell communications of ME and predicting the potentially effective drugs to inhibit the communications. Moreover, the data analysis processes of discovering signaling communication networks and effective drugs using scRNA-seq data are complex and involve a set of critical analysis processes and external supportive data resources, which are difficult for researchers who have no strong computational background and training in scRNA-seq data analysis. To address these challenges, in this study, we developed a novel open-source computational tool, sc2MeNetDrug ( https://fuhaililab.github.io/sc2MeNetDrug/ ). It was specifically designed using scRNA-seq data to identify cell types within disease MEs, uncover the dysfunctional signaling pathways within individual cell types and interactions among different cell types, and predict effective drugs that can potentially disrupt cell-cell signaling communications. sc2MeNetDrug provided a user-friendly graphical user interface to encapsulate the data analysis modules, which can facilitate the scRNA-seq data-based discovery of novel inter-cell signaling communications and novel therapeutic regimens.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Alzheimer's disease / Annotations / Biology and Life Sciences / Biomarkers / Brain tumors / Cancer therapies / Cell signaling / Cells / Cellular signal transduction / Clustering / Communication / Communication networks / Communications / Computational neuroscience / Computer and Information Sciences / Data analysis / Design / Disease progression / Drug development / Drug discovery / Drugs / Electronic data processing / Gene sequencing / Genes / Graphical user interface / Health aspects / Heterogeneity / Immunosuppressive agents / Immunotherapy / Ligands / Medicine and Health Sciences / Methods / Neurodegenerative diseases / Ontology / Pancreatic cancer / Quality control / Research and Analysis Methods / RNA sequencing / Signaling / Software / Target recognition / Technology application / Therapeutic targets / Tumor cells / Tumor microenvironment / Tumors / User interface